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This is a case of “Let the buyer beware.” I am an avid baseball fan, and living in St. Louis, my favorite team is the St. Louis Cardinals. On of my favorite players – well ex-player now, is Jim Edmonds who played centerfield for the Cardinals from 2000 to 2008. Solast December my youngest daughter and her boyfriend wanted to get me a Jim Edmonds jersey for Christmas. I didn’t want them to shell out the $100.00 or so dollars from the team store so I hopped on line and found this. $30.00 sounded like a good deal and the fact that the shipping and handling was $20.00 didn’t set off any warning bells (it should have though), because what I actually received was a Philadelphia Phillies Roy Halladay jersey. So, I got it touch with the seller and after exchanging 5-6 emails the upshot was that I would need to pay more money to get the item I ordered – with no guarantee that I would actually get the item I ordered. I have no interest in throwing good money after bad and contented myself with reporting the company to the BBB and the Attorney General for the State of Missouri (not that I think either of those actions will do any good).

If anybody is interested in buying the jersey let me know, it is $50.00 – although that is somewhat negotiable.

I haven’t been able to do much blogging because Mrs. afarensis has been doing work from home in the evenings (which ended Friday – she will be returning to her office Monday allowing me to actually write some posts). While this was occurring Dr. Ben Carson popped up in the news for criticizing President Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast. Which caused a flurry of searches for info about Carson and resulted in a lot of hits for the post I wrote on his views on evolution. Which leads me to ask two things. First, What is it about neurosurgeons and pseudoscientific bullshit? Second, what is it about neurosurgeons that cause them to let their inner right wing nutjob loose on the rest of the world? Actually, I have a third, what is it about a middle of the road politician like Obama that sends right wing nutjobs into absolute paroxysms of insanity (don’t answer, I know the answer to this one)?

Carol for Another Christmas was written by Rod Serling and was part of a series of Xerox specials promoting the United Nations. It has ran several times on TCM recently and if it comes on again I highly recommend you see it. The movie is based on Dicken’s A Christmas Carol) and features a number of interesting performances (Steve Lawrence was brilliant as the Ghost of Christmas Past). In the clip below* Peter Sellers gives a phenomenal perfomance as the “Imperial Me.” When watching this part of the movie I couldn’t help thinking about the current state of the Republican party.

I have been meaning to write about this for some time now. A bill in the Missouri Senate would make it easier for employers to fire employees and make it harder for those employees to collect unemployment. From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

The bill by Republican Sen. Will Kraus, of Lee’s Summit, would include accidental violations — unless the employee could prove ignorance of the rule’s existence.

The legislation would also broaden the definition of “misconduct” to include violations of an employer’s rules outside the workplace and on an employee’s own time.

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"You may not be willing to admit that you resemble an ape; if your thousandth ancestor is more like an ape than you are, you may, if you wish, call it a coincidence. But if that thousandth ancestor's forebears become progressively more simian as you trace back the geneological lines, you will have to admit that somewhere in your family tree there squats an ape." Earnest Hooten

Charles Darwin

"But I had gradually come, by this time, to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow at sign, etc., etc., and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian." Charles Darwin: The Autobiography